Resting in armour

[Tony Vargas]

If you really want to make resting time more dangerous (as I assume you do by asking about a rule to encourage people not to rest in armor) without being unduly punitive to specific classes, you could implement a wake-up penalty where each character is considered to be exhausted for the first 1d4 minutes after waking up (note, the character would not actually accrue any levels of exhaustion; they would simply be treated as having one level of exhaustion).

Good idea. Or you could give attackers advantage until the rudely-awoken character makes a CON save (repeated at the start of each of his turns), the save could be harder if the character was exhausted or badly wounded or tapped out of spell slots before he went to sleep...

 

[FrogReaver]

Not having any armor on is too big of a drawback for a heavy armor wearing character, especially since most of those characters are meant to be front line style characters. Losing the 5 or 6 AC the lose from not having armor is HUGE!

The only fix I can see is make dex based characters require wearing armor before benefiting from their dex bonus to ac. After that you have enough character classes on the same page that you can implement whatever kind of drawback you want to get the game to fill how you want. Yes there's still some that will not face that challenge (barbarians, monks, anyone with mage armor, dragon sorcerer), but at least its not just like 2 classes (fighters and paladins) being impacted anymore.

 

[dco]

I use the exhaustion condition. CON roll difficulty 10 , failure = 1 level of exhaustion and this continues for each day the character continues sleeping in armor. Difficulty +5 if all the group need to roll CON for other circumstances.

 

[S'mon]

I think 1 level of exhaustion after 1 week spent in armour sounds reasonable to me, max 3 levels, assuming temperate climes. After 3 weeks check for infestation. Should be able to rest overnight in armour ok.

Edit: Wet socks a far more serious issue. "They died with their boots on" is a phrase for good reason!

 

[dco]

But why would you ever take your armour off if there's literally no benefit to doing so and no downside to wearing armour,what's the point of this rule

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Some people don't use armor in their games as if it were silk or part of the character's skin, so when they rest, swim, climb, etc they could have more problems than other characters.
It could be needed to enter some places, like a hole in a wall, the bed of your lover, etc.
But it will all depend on the DM.

 

[Ancalagon]

In my game, you can't sleep in medium or heavy armor.

*However*, heavy armor is assumed to include under padding that can be slept in. While it's not rugged enough to serve as armor regularly, in can in a pitch work as padded armor. So the heavy armored folks don't loose all armor bonuses (they have +1) and may even get some from dex.